Although the hair fashion inclusive of hair length and hair style changes with the times, there is always a deeply rooted aspiration for so-called "long hair", and this trend is reflected by a fact that, recently, 70 to 80% of high school students, unmarried women up to about 25 years old and even married women, particularly being childless, are long-haired.
Meanwhile, people in our country tend to desire "comfortableness" in their daily life more and more as the national economic state is stabilized and, with a consequence, a life style such as bathroom equipment and bathing manners has been created, which is substantially different from the conventional one. For example, many young women take hair shampooing every morning before going to their schools or offices and such habit commonly called "morning shampooing" has been established as a new life style in our country.
People have been well-informed of hair care science and commonly have learned the fact that the cuticle comprising 18 amino acids and forming the epidermis of hair is sensitive to heat and alkali and blown hot air drying for a long time after "morning shampooing" would seriously damage hair, causing elasticity loss of the hair, destruction of the cuticle and causing the hair to be split and/or broken.
Conventional methods of hair drying after shampooing can be generally classified into "spontaneous drying", "blot-up drying" with a towel and "blown hot air drying" with an electric hair dryer.
Said spontaneous drying method is initiated by primary draining off, i.e., towel drying immediately after shampooing.
After such towel drying, a certain amount, typically 5 to 10 g of water still remains, depending on hair length, and hair brushing or combining in such state would cause water to drip from the hair strand tips which is uncomfortably cold for the skin. Shampooing with one's clothes on would wet clothes. Accordingly, the towel hair drying step will be followed by spontaneous hair drying with a dried towel wrapping the still wet hair like a turban. Such method would require, although depending on an amount of hair, approximately 1 hour and is troublesome for women having the previously mentioned habit of "morning shampooing" and sometimes cause them to get a cold.
To shorten the time otherwise taken for said spontaneous hair drying, after the towel drying, hair is parted into small sections which are then successively blotted up with a dried towel held between both hands. Such method is the so-called "blot-up" hair drying method. From the viewpoint of the fact that scrubbing hair with a towel might damage hair even if this towel is fairly soft, this blot-up hair drying method is certainly advantageous to the health of the hair.
However, this blot-up procedure also is time-consuming and requires further brushing thereafter because hair strands tend to cling together immediately after shampooing and to resist a comb or brush used to part hair into small sections.
The blown hot air drying method with use of an electric hair dryer is not preferable for hair which is, as has previously been mentioned, sensitive to heat. Air blown at a low temperature would require a time period as long as approximately 30 minutes for adequate evaporation of water held among the hair strands.
In addition to the above-mentioned hair drying methods of well-known art, there have already been proposed several types of absorptive towel, for example, those known by the names of "quick dry towel" and "non-dry towel". Furthermore, water-absorptive combs or brushes have also been disclosed, for example, by U.S. Pat. No. 4,421,129; Japanese Patent Application Disclosure Gazette No. 1985-20827; and Japanese Utility Model Application Disclosure Gazette No. 1984-105405.